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The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark (Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/america-democracy-autocracy/684335/-snip-
All of these changes are part of a larger shift, a revolutionary transformation in the way Americans present themselves to the world, and the way they are therefore perceived by others. The most ubiquitous form of American culture nowadays is not jazz programming going out on shortwave radio across Eurasia, but the social-media platforms that pump conspiracy theories, extremism, advertising, pornography, and spam into every corner of the globe. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union for political dissent, the U.S. government facilitated his arrival in America. Now we have different heroes: The Trump administration went out of its way to rescue and welcome the Tate brothers, who had been arrested and briefly held in Romania, charged with rape in Great Britain. (The Tates deny the charges.) Instead of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we now have the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of movable rent-a-troll event. Identikit nationalists anywhere—Hungary, Poland, Britain, Mexico, Brazil—can pay the CPAC team to come to their country and produce a MAGA show. Steve Bannon or Kristi Noem will show up, deliver a rowdy speech alongside the local talent, and help them make headlines. A CPAC conference held near Rzeszów a few days before the second round of the Polish presidential election featured Noem and was sponsored by a Polish cryptocurrency company that wants a U.S. license.
American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarian aid is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.
The impact of this change around the world will be profound, far-reaching, and long-lasting. The very existence of American democracy inspired people in every corner of the planet, and the decline of American democracy will have the same effect. Perhaps the mere existence of Trump’s America will boost new autocratic parties that will carry out assaults on their own democratic political systems, as Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have already done in Brazil. Perhaps the Chinese and Russian propagandists who replace Voice of America and Radio Free Europe will simply win global ideological arguments and undermine American economic influence and trade.
More unpredictable is the impact of the change on Americans. If we are no longer a country that aims to make the world better, but rather a country whose foreign policy is designed to build the wealth of the president or promote the ruling party’s foreign friends, then we have fewer reasons to work together at home. If we promote cynicism abroad, we will become more cynical at home. Perhaps expecting Americans to live up to the extraordinary ideals that they proclaimed in the 18th century was always unreasonable, but that language nevertheless shaped the way we thought about ourselves. Now we live in a world where America is led by people who have abandoned those ideals altogether. That will change all of us, in ways we might not yet be able to see.
All of these changes are part of a larger shift, a revolutionary transformation in the way Americans present themselves to the world, and the way they are therefore perceived by others. The most ubiquitous form of American culture nowadays is not jazz programming going out on shortwave radio across Eurasia, but the social-media platforms that pump conspiracy theories, extremism, advertising, pornography, and spam into every corner of the globe. After Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union for political dissent, the U.S. government facilitated his arrival in America. Now we have different heroes: The Trump administration went out of its way to rescue and welcome the Tate brothers, who had been arrested and briefly held in Romania, charged with rape in Great Britain. (The Tates deny the charges.) Instead of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we now have the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of movable rent-a-troll event. Identikit nationalists anywhere—Hungary, Poland, Britain, Mexico, Brazil—can pay the CPAC team to come to their country and produce a MAGA show. Steve Bannon or Kristi Noem will show up, deliver a rowdy speech alongside the local talent, and help them make headlines. A CPAC conference held near Rzeszów a few days before the second round of the Polish presidential election featured Noem and was sponsored by a Polish cryptocurrency company that wants a U.S. license.
American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarian aid is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.
The impact of this change around the world will be profound, far-reaching, and long-lasting. The very existence of American democracy inspired people in every corner of the planet, and the decline of American democracy will have the same effect. Perhaps the mere existence of Trump’s America will boost new autocratic parties that will carry out assaults on their own democratic political systems, as Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have already done in Brazil. Perhaps the Chinese and Russian propagandists who replace Voice of America and Radio Free Europe will simply win global ideological arguments and undermine American economic influence and trade.
More unpredictable is the impact of the change on Americans. If we are no longer a country that aims to make the world better, but rather a country whose foreign policy is designed to build the wealth of the president or promote the ruling party’s foreign friends, then we have fewer reasons to work together at home. If we promote cynicism abroad, we will become more cynical at home. Perhaps expecting Americans to live up to the extraordinary ideals that they proclaimed in the 18th century was always unreasonable, but that language nevertheless shaped the way we thought about ourselves. Now we live in a world where America is led by people who have abandoned those ideals altogether. That will change all of us, in ways we might not yet be able to see.
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